Rioja

Developing social activations to conquer the Chinese wine market

The back story

When Rioja first approached us, they were looking to develop their business in China. They had zero digital presence in China, neither on social media nor Baidu. We therefore developed their local branding strategy, revamped their exisiting marketing materials and built their Chinese website. Once their presence had been put in place, we needed to promote it. As with any digital marketing campaign, this meant working on their local SEO strategy but not only. Social media is one of the most important components of the Chinese digital landscape and Rioja needed us to generate interest and engagement on popular Chinese social media channels.

What we did

In order to generate engagement on Chinese social media platforms, we know with experience that daily maintenance will only take you so far. As well as publishing regular content related to the Rioja Wine brand and its products, we took things a step further by creating online and offline user activations that enabled Rioja Wine to entertain and grow its online community.

Leveraging hot topics

Huang Xiaoming’s wedding has been a hot topic since the beginning of the year 2015. Meanwhile he’s cooperating with the Rioja LAN winery and served LAN wine on his wedding. We leveraged the buzz around his wedding to encourage more people to share our article. Also, we communicated regarding his cooperation with Rioja to enhance Rioja’s brand exposure.

Rioja map contest

We developed a wine-centered quiz to post on WeChat and asked people to answer our questions in the most creative way possible. Readers could “like” the answer they found the most creative and the 30 people with the most likes could win the Rioja map for free. The post was liked and shared, resulting in an increase in the number of followers on the Rioja Wine official WeChat account and further visibility for the brand.

O2O wine tasting campaign

We released a wine label image on the official Rioja WeChat account and encouraged fans to participate in an upcoming grand tasting event, challenging them to find the actual bottle that was represented on the WeChat post. The 1st person to find the correct wine and post it on their WeChat moments with a Rioja tag could get that bottle of wine for free. The game aimed to generate more brand exposure for Rioja on an offline & online level.